I tried to like as many pages as I could. There are lots of great vacation rentals in this thread! We'd like to stay at all of them.

If you want to quickly add FB page "Likes", consider an ad on FB. For just a few dollars, you can get over the 25 fan threshold for the vanity URL. We set up an ad one night before going to bed and woke up to 40 new fans. We pay around 0.20 per click and convert about 80% of clicks to Likes. I have no idea if this is good, but compared to what I paid for Google advertising, it seems like I get more traffic per dollar on FB. I would be interested in others experience (maybe a new thread topic focused on FB/Social media advertising).

Paradise, how did you get .20 per click? That's fantastic! We marketed in Cincinnati and Nashville and our PPC ran about 45-50 cents. At the beginning of our campaign, FB suspended our Nashville campaign because our PPC bid was too low to be productive (I think we were bidding 76 cents max for a click). At the end of our 4 week campaign, we ended up with about 120 Likes at a cost of $100. Our conversion rate from clicks to likes was about 2 clicks for every 1 like. I'm hoping Jennifer on the social media forum can give me some insight as to how we can do a better job next time and lower that PPC cost. Congrats on coming out with such a strong performance. I think you did a great job!

I just started a new ad last night. So far, I have spent $5.37 and have 17 new Likes. I am averaging 0.24 CPC and had 22 clicks total. I set a $3 a day budget so I don't run up a big bill. The CPC will drop as I get more days worth of data. My bid is 0.46 per click. I tried to attach a screen shot but there was an error. May we start a thread for ad stats because I am interested in finding out what a good benchmark is.

My previous ad cost me $23 for 72 likes and about 100 clicks.

I have been running different versions of the same basic ad with different pictures and different landing pages to see what the most effective combo is.

I also have run a FB ad but sent the user to my Vacation Rentals ad (external link). This ad had worse stats. The CPC was 0.60 and the CTR was very low. I had a $50 FB ad credit from somewhere so it was free money and I wanted to see how it worked. I wont spend my own money this way unless I figure out what I did wrong. In the end, I didnt get any new VR inquiries - it seems running a deal works better to increase inquiries for VR.

Lastly. I had a $100 Google credit and ran a ad on Google directing them to our cabin website which has the VRBO calendar integrated. We burned through that pretty quickly. We paid $107 for 197 clicks (0.55 CPC) and maybe got 2 phone calls with little chance we can interact with them in the future.

I've liked you as - do like you page very much & very inviting - well done. I've so much work to do this winter - I'm starting to get stressed thinking about it...not just new stair cases kitchen etc but websites and facebook pages!!!

even 50 cents a fan may be good! We are seeing that many of the ads are priced differently in different markets, depending how much competition there is in that market. We had some luck trying to target different groups and found some groups were less than others. .20 cents a click is pretty remarkable!

Over the weekend I read Jenn's five social media articles here on the Community page and learned a lot. The first thing that I would point out is her suggestion of using PageModo to customize a landing page for your FB fan page. I spent yesterday afternoon doing this and was able to select my favorite photos and add a little blurb for FREE.

www.facebook.com/ranchomiragevacationrental

I currently have two FB ads running and hope that having this as the landing page will increase the number of folks who "like" my page and check out my house!

I also created a new album with lots of photos of my property. And I have put my Constant Contact newsletter up, promoting specials, also have a button to join my list, which is my contact management system on Constant Contact.

Recently I put up a little blurb about our local wild animal park featuring their Baby Giraffe Naming Contest and their holiday events, offering a $50 discount for those guests who become new members of the park and check into my house.

I can't say that I think these things are driving a lot of business, but these are all experiments to make my page more engaging. If anyone has other thoughts or feedback, let me know!

Great (and extensive) post! On this same topic, I would encourage owners to try using ASmallWorld.net. It's an invite-only version of Facebook (a little more glamorous) that features travel forums. Posting a little ad for your vacation rental (it's free) here is pretty effective because the userbase is extremely trusting of one another. Even more effective is getting one of the ASW experts to include your rental in their area destination guides. For our rentals, being listed in the Panama guide, we get about 3 reservations a month. Not bad for a free networking service!

Paradise, that could be it. I was targeting Nashville and Cincinnati as a more general population from mid-20s and up. Next time I'll narrow the range and maybe the PPC will be more reasonable. Thanks!

I'm new to community thing.... I'm not even sure I've posted my facebook page correctly. Don't really know what else to write. Can anyone give me any ideas??? my website is www.stayloutraki.com. From there you can "like" my site. I will "like" everyone on this page so far and continue to do so now that I'm on Homeaway Community.